Friday, December 3, 2010

Playing with Closure UI Library: Slider

For Google Developer Day in Saõ Paulo, my colleague Ossama Alami created this sample, which allows you to select between three different Google Fusion Tables layers and play with queries against them. I looked at that and decided that I would use it to play with the Closure Library. Specifically, I wanted to play with the UI library. So for the GDD events in Munich, Moscow, and Prague, I decided to add a slider. The results were fun, and instructional for me. The code to add a slider was pretty simple. Here's my sample, and here's the slider code:

I just took that from the documentation. Of course, there's a an HTML element for the slider, and some CSS to style it, and loading the library itself. Well, you can view source. The instructional bit was that of course as soon as you move the slider, events start firing. If you listen for a CHANGE event, as you slide the slider, it'll fire too fast. Each tick, it'll try to grab a new layer from Fusion Tables. That'll consume lots of bandwidth as FT tries to return a layer with each tick. So instead, I listen for MOUSEOUT, KEYUP, and MOUSEUP events, which fire when the user is done moving the slider, either moving off it or releasing the mouse.